American culture killing literacy

Press, 14 May 1981, Page 24

American culture killing literacy

By

ROBERT TAYLOR

of "Boston Globe” through NZPA •'Life” died at seven milion. “Look" expired at six million. “The “Saturday Evening Post” bought the course at five. These magazines were mastodons in an era of mosquitoes and were too costly to produce. When the band strikes up “Just i Closer Walk With Thee” for a general-inter-est magazine, experts dispute what went haywire but the only appropriate epitaph is suggested by the death of Bix Beider* becke. “What did Bix die of?” a fellow jazzman was asked. He answered, “Everything.” “Harper’s” magazine, aged 130, has just gone out at 325,000, miniscule compared with the • masscirculation magazine of yesteryear. Its editor, Lewis H. Lapham, wistfully voiced a hope that the magazine might squeeze by with 200,000 truly faithful readers.

What then killed “Harner’s”? Everything and nothing. Everything includes the unfriendly mathematics of the marketplace. It is becoming impossible to profit from general-interest magazine.

Known to the trade as “horizontal books” (be-, cause they cut across several categories of knowledge, unlike “vertical books” or specialised magazines), the generalniterest magazine is the victim of economics (postage, paper, declining advertisement revenue) and television culture. About the only horizontal books still extant are the “Atlantic Monthly”, “Reader’s Digest,” the “New . Republic,” the “Nation,” “People,” “TV Guide,” and “The New Yorker."

Each is characterised by a formula. The formula of

“Playboy” and magazines of its ilk is obvious. The “Digest” and “TV Guide” are service magazines, the firmer condensing reading time the latter condensing watching time. “People” is relatively new and many or may not outlast narcissim. The formula of “Harper’s” and for the rest is excellence.

Which brings up nothing, the vacuity of a tele-vision-oriented culture. More than anything else, “Harper’s” died from the galloping illiteracy of »he American public. The magazine perished most grievously t:cause people do not like to make the minimal effort required to read a magazine. This was predicted by the media critic Marshall McLuhan about 30 years ago. He was derided for his jargon and for his theories about passing from an age of pri. t into an age of electronic images but time must have a stop. He knew whereof he spoke. But McLuhan, a James Joyce scholar and hence a chronic optimist, was cheerful about the change which others view in bleaker terms.

Jerrold Hickey,, the former editor of “Boston Magazine,” formulates the present situation in American magazines as Hickey’s Law: “The better you get, the worse you are.”

One may imagine that in a nation which at the last census consisted of 203 million people there might be 200,000 readers willing to satisfy Lapham’s vision of an ideal audience. But no. Like some vestigal Twitch of evolution, the capacity to read is slowly reaching a state of atrophy. Now that “Harper’s” is defunct, there will be nostalgic accounts of the magazine’s distinguished literary past. These accounts, aimed at the dwindling band of America’s literates, will emphasise the exalted character cf the magazine’s history. Note, hov/ever, the remoteness of most of the

great figures: Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Winsolm Homer. Even the social crusades for which “Harper’s” was especially reputed — sweatshops, the sociology of sharecroppers, the geopolitical analysts of foreign affairs — display a historical edge.

While “Harper’s” printed uncounted eminent writers of recent vintage, they somehow seem less literary than the old crowd. Can you imagine any modern . horizontal book attracting writers of the calibre of Dickens and Thackeray? Not really: the graphics designer is competing for attention and the page itself assumes the aspect of a video screen.

“Harper’s” did all it could to keep up with the times. A look at the current issue is instructive. Featured are pieces by A. Bartlett Giamatti, the president of Yale, and George A. Carver, a senior fellow from a think tank. But two articles, one by Tom Bethell discussing why politics are more important than literature in the United States, the other by George P. Elliot on pseudo-culture, show why “Harper’s” died. It is a perilous time, indeed. This year at Harvard’s commencement the crowd chanted Walter Cronkite’s name, not as a Harvard crowd might once have done, because his name is wonderfully silly sound, but in respectful tribute. Cronkite is doubtless a fine journalist and a gentleman. Nevertheless he traffics in a medium where supplying random data passes for knowledge.

American culture, always an endangered species and never a very flourishing bloom, looms behind the demise of “Harper’s.” When you think of it, nations used to go to war to preserve a specific culture but since we do not read any more, no-one will be able to decipher the immortal. “We have met the enemy and he is us.”